Mark Owen - No Easy Day

One of the pirates always sat on top of the covered area keeping watch; engaging him would be simple. They could also see one pirate through the window steering the boat, another relatively easy target. But the third pirate was always hidden, and they needed to take out all three at the same time. The only way to take the shots and ensure Phillips’s safety was to get the third pirate to expose himself. Finally, after hours of waiting, on Sunday night the third pirate’s head and shoulders emerged from the rear hatch of the lifeboat. That was all the snipers needed. The orders stated, only act if Phillips’s life was in imminent danger. With tensions already high, and fearing for Phillips’s safety, my teammates opened fire. In seconds, all three pirates crumbled under the barrage.

After the last of the sniper shots rang out, the team on the fantail heard one unmistakable crack from a pirate’s AK-47. The single shot echoed over the water, and my teammates were immediately deflated. The stakes were high. Washington was getting frequent updates, and they were watching drone feeds of the lifeboat. The commanding officer of DEVGRU and our squadron commander were both on the USS Boxer .

Fearing the worst and not knowing if Phillips was dead or wounded, two snipers near the towline jumped up and started to slither down the rope to the boat. There was no time to waste. Balancing on top of the towline, which bobbed inches above the dark waves, they reached the boat in minutes. Armed with only pistols, they boarded the lifeboat and swung inside the enclosure. There was a single opening into the raft, making them an easy target for even a wounded pirate.

Entering the life raft, they quickly and methodically reengaged each pirate, making sure there was no more threat. They found Phillips tied up in the corner, unhurt. The USS Bainbridge ’s rigid-hull inflatable boat carrying a handful of SEALs was shadowing the lifeboat. When they heard the shots, the boat raced in and the SEALs pulled Phillips off the lifeboat.

Back on the Bainbridge , before the last shot rang out, Gary grabbed Musi and slammed him onto the deck.

“You’re going to jail,” he said. “Your buddies are dead. You’re useless to me now.”

With his hands cuffed and a hood pulled over his head, Musi was led away.

Gary met Phillips at the fantail. The captain was confused and disoriented as he climbed on board the Bainbridge .

“Why did you guys have to do that?” Phillips said.

He was suffering from a minor case of Stockholm syndrome and in the shock of the shootings, he didn’t understand what had just happened and why.

Phillips underwent a medical exam and was found to be in relatively good condition. It didn’t take long before the Stockholm syndrome wore off. He was thankful for what my teammates had done. He called his family and was flown to the USS Boxer before heading home to Vermont.

The rest of us spent a few more days on the USS Boxer , waiting for follow-on orders before moving ashore and then flying home. It felt good to finally save a life instead of just taking guys out. It was cool to do something outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. I was happy to do something different. But the downside was we got a glimpse of the Washington machine and just how slow the decision-making could be. We were ready to launch on this days before we actually got the call. But the Captain Phillips mission renewed our capabilities and put us on Washington’s radar for other high-profile missions.

My legs ached and my lungs burned as I raced up the mountain.

It was summer 2009 and we were about eight thousand feet up in the central Afghan mountains two hours south of Kabul. After the Phillips rescue, we returned home, trained for several months, and then deployed on schedule to Afghanistan.

I could see the infrared laser from the aerial drone tracking the movement of eight fighters who ran out of the target compound when we arrived. Our team tore off after them as soon as the helicopter’s ramp hit the ground.

“Alpha Team has visual on squirters,” was all I heard Phil say over the radio.

The fighters were headed for a ridgeline three hundred meters north of the compound. We were trying to cut them off while the rest of the troop took down the compound. As we closed on their position, I looked back to see Phil and the rest of the team close behind. It was our first mission on this deployment, and we were still getting used to the altitude.

Seeing the rest of the team moving into position, I snapped back around and shouldered my rifle. The enemy fighters were setting up a fighting position roughly one hundred and fifty yards away. I could barely keep my laser steady after the five-hundred-meter run in all of my gear, but I managed to lock on to the fighter with a PKM machine gun. Squeezing off multiple rounds, I watched him fall. By then, my teammates arrived and opened fire, dropping two more fighters before the rest disappeared over the ridgeline and out of sight.

Leaving their dead, the remaining fighters raced down the backside of the ridge.

“We have five hotspots moving to the north toward several compounds,” I heard the drone pilot say in my radio. I could see the laser from the drone moving down the backside of the hill.

Phil gave the team a nod, and we were off on another dead sprint to close the distance.

As we crested the top of the ridgeline, we slowed down, careful not to rush into a hasty ambush. I saw three bodies lying there, one with the machine gun and one with an RPG. We were lucky to take out their two biggest guns in the first seconds of the fight.

The dead fighters were dressed in baggy shirts and pants and black Cheetahs, high-top Puma-like sneakers worn by Taliban fighters. It was a running joke in the squadron that if you wore black Cheetahs in Afghanistan, you were automatically suspect. I’ve never seen anyone but Taliban fighters in those sneakers.

From the ridgeline, we could see the surviving fighters tearing down the backside of the hill. Phil snatched the RPG lying next to one of the dead fighters and fired it at the group as they ran off. The rocket landed nearby, and the shrapnel peppered the fighters as they ran.

Dropping the launcher, he turned to me. Over the radio, we were getting calls about close air support, or CAS. An AC-130 gunship was circling above us.

“CAS IS COMING ON STATION,” Phil literally screamed at me from two feet away.

The RPG had knocked out his hearing.

“I can hear you,” I said. “Stop screaming.”

“WHAT?” Phil said.

For the rest of the night, I could hear Phil before I saw him. Every word out of his mouth came in a scream.

We watched from the ridgeline as the AC-130’s 20mm cannon pounded the fighters. Sending the combat assault dog, which Phil had nicknamed the “hair missile,” ahead, we spent the rest of the night chasing down the remaining fighters. All of them were either mortally wounded or dead.

Phil and another assaulter chased a fighter into one of the compounds, while the rest of us started to clear a field of waist-deep grass. The AC-130 was reporting more hotspots. We launched the hair missile and he locked on to the scent of a fighter about fifty feet to my right. I could hear the fighter start screaming as the dog attacked.

Calling the dog off, the assaulters threw hand grenades into the ditch where the fighter waited to ambush us. As they moved up to clear the ditch, I started to move forward.

Even under my night vision goggles, it was difficult to see. The grass was thick and hard to walk through. Behind me, I could hear intermittent gunfire as Phil and another assaulter were in a firefight with a barricaded shooter in one of the compounds. My gun was up and I tried to use my laser to illuminate a path through the grass. I could see burnt patches ahead of me where 20mm shells had hit.